I looked down at the seal resting in my palm. “You haven’t asked where I got it.”
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “When someone has one of those, you don’t ask.”
If Hawthorne House looked like a castle, Vincent Blake’s home called to mind a fortress. It was made of dark stone, its square lines interrupted only by two giant round columns rising into turrets. A wrought-iron balcony lined the front perimeter on the second floor. I half expected a drawbridge, but instead there was a wraparound porch.
Eve stood on that porch, her amber hair blowing in the wind.
Blake’s security followed me as I walked toward her. When I stepped up onto the porch, Eve turned, a strategic move designed to force me into following.
“This all would have been so much easier,” she said, “if you’d just given me what I asked for.”
CHAPTER 78
Eve didn’t lead me into the house. She led me around back. A man stood there. He had suntanned skin and silver hair shorn to the scalp. I knew he had to be in his eighties, but he looked closer to sixty-five—and like he could run a marathon.
He was holding a shotgun.
As I watched, he took aim at the sky. The sound of the shot was earsplitting and echoed through the countryside as a bird plummeted to the ground. Vincent Blake said something—I couldn’t hear what—and the largest bloodhound I’d ever seen took off after the kill.
Blake lowered his weapon. Slowly, he turned to face me. “Around here,”
he called, in that smooth, borderline-aristocratic voice I recognized all too well from the phone, “we cook what we shoot.”
He held out the gun, and someone rushed to take it from him. Then Blake strode toward us. He settled down on a cement wall near a massive firepit, and Eve led me right up to it—and him.
“Where are Grayson and Toby?” That was the only greeting this man was going to get out of me.
“Enjoying my hospitality.” Blake eyed the large box I carried in my hands. Wordlessly, I opened it. I’d stopped in the vault to retrieve the royal chess set. Once I’d been granted admission to Blake’s lands, I’d had Oren surreptitiously hand it to me.
Now I set it in front of Blake, an offering of sorts.
He picked up one of the pieces, examining the multitude of shining black diamonds, the artistry of the design, then snorted and tossed the piece back down. “Tobias always was the showy type.” Blake held out his right hand, and someone placed a bowie knife in it.
My heart leapt into my throat, but all the king of this kingdom did was withdraw a small piece of wood from his pocket.
“A set you carve yourself,” he told me, “plays just the same.”
That’s not a carving knife. I didn’t let him intimidate me into saying that out loud. Instead, I leaned forward to place the seal I’d flashed to gain entrance beside him on the wall. “I believe this is yours,” I told him. Then I nodded to the chess set I’d brought. “And we’ll call that a gift.”
“I didn’t ask you to bring me a gift, Avery Kylie Grambs.”
I met his iron-hard gaze. “You didn’t ask for anything. You told me to bring you your son, and you’ll get him.” By now, Blake doubtlessly would have heard the reports that Landon had leaked. There was a good chance that he’d watched my press conference. “Once the investigation is complete,” I continued, “the authorities will release his remains to you. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I don’t lose, Avery Kylie Grambs.” Blake’s knife flashed in the sun as he scraped it along the wood. “My son, on the other hand, appears to have lost quite a bit.”